Arts Plus. Theater.

`Hiroshima' A Curious Mix

Bailiwick Play Is Both Powerful, Puzzling

Looking back on the fury of the atomic bomb that he had just dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the pilot of the American B-29 bomber noted, "This is the greatest thing in history."

Great, indeed, and yet, 50 years later, how good or how bad a thing it was is still in debate.

To try to supply a reasonable perspective on the matter, Bailiwick Repertory has ambitiously focused on the issue on this 50th anniversary summer with a staged potpourri of documentation and imagination called "If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns: The Hiroshima Project."

Written by Nicholas Patricca, Dwight Okita, Anne V. McGravie and director David Zak, the resulting two-act piece is a curious mix.

Three continuing stories thread through the evening's mass of information. In one, a character defined as "The Physicist" (portrayed by Joel Sanchez) explains the science and traces the scientists' involvement with the bomb. In another, two women, one a Hiroshima resident (Caroline Yuat) and the other a European (Alyson Horn), exchange letters of friendship over a period of 56 years.

In the third and most bizarre story, Okita and composer Chuck Larkin set to music portions of a 1950s "This Is Your Life" TV program in which a Hiroshima minister (Gabriel Lingat) is confronted with the co-pilot (Timothy Jon) of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb.

The sheer enormity of the event inevitably gives the production power. The scientific data are carefully explained, and the stark facts-the temperature of the blast reached 3,450 degrees Fahrenheit-are simply, awesomely laid out.

The performance further tries to enlighten its subject by using excerpts from the text of the controversial, canceled Hiroshima exhibit that was to have been mounted this year at the Smithsonian Institution.

Zak's staging of "The Hiroshima Project" is stately and minimal. The eight actors, dressed in black and gray, are initially lined up in a row of chairs. Then, as the play proceeds, they take turns rising and coming forward to recite the documentation and enact the situations.

Admirable as their work is, and as hard as Zak has tried to weave the various writings into a cohesive whole, the play is often an uneasy combination of aims and talents.

Most strange and out of place is the mini-musical, with solos and duets, that Okita and Larkin have created for their "This Is Your Life" segments, which have neither the lyrics nor the music to make the effort either palatable or compatible.